Contents

Ngalakan has a typical Australian consonant inventory, with many coronal places of articulation (see Coronals in Indigenous Australian languages), including nasals at every stop place, and four liquids, but no fricatives. Baker (1999, 2008) analyses the language as having both geminate and singleton realizations of every plosive consonant. Merlan (1983), however, argues that there is a fortis–lenis contrast, and thus two series of plosives rather than the one shown here. Lenis/short plosives have weak contact and intermittent voicing, while fortis/long plosives have full closure, a more powerful release burst, and no voicing. Similar contrasts are found in other Gunwinyguan languages, such as Bininj Gun-wok,[3]Jawoyn, Dalabon, Rembarrnga, Ngandi,[4] as well as in the neighboring Yolngu languages.

Free word order, with no syntactically governed positions for subject, object, verb etc. in a sentence. All this information is encoded in the morphology, which results in highly complex word structures. Interpreting these complex words correctly is crucial in determining what the speaker is trying to say.

1.
Australia
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Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the worlds sixth-largest country by total area, the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and East Timor to the north, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east, and New Zealand to the south-east. Australias capital is Canberra, and its largest urban area is Sydney, for about 50,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians, who spoke languages classifiable into roughly 250 groups. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades, and by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored, on 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. Australia has since maintained a liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy comprising six states. The population of 24 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard, Australia has the worlds 13th-largest economy and ninth-highest per capita income. With the second-highest human development index globally, the country highly in quality of life, health, education, economic freedom. The name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis a name used for putative lands in the southern hemisphere since ancient times, the Dutch adjectival form Australische was used in a Dutch book in Batavia in 1638, to refer to the newly discovered lands to the south. On 12 December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted, in 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially as Australia. The first official published use of the term Australia came with the 1830 publication of The Australia Directory and these first inhabitants may have been ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. The Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, were originally horticulturists, the northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited sporadically by fishermen from Maritime Southeast Asia. The first recorded European sighting of the Australian mainland, and the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent, are attributed to the Dutch. The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken captained by Dutch navigator, Willem Janszoon. He sighted the coast of Cape York Peninsula in early 1606, the Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent New Holland during the 17th century, but made no attempt at settlement. William Dampier, an English explorer and privateer, landed on the north-west coast of New Holland in 1688, in 1770, James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast, which he named New South Wales and claimed for Great Britain. The first settlement led to the foundation of Sydney, and the exploration, a British settlement was established in Van Diemens Land, now known as Tasmania, in 1803, and it became a separate colony in 1825. The United Kingdom formally claimed the part of Western Australia in 1828. Separate colonies were carved from parts of New South Wales, South Australia in 1836, Victoria in 1851, the Northern Territory was founded in 1911 when it was excised from South Australia

2.
Northern Territory
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The Northern Territory is a federal Australian territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. It shares borders with Western Australia to the west, South Australia to the south, to the north, the territory is bordered by the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria. Despite its large area—over 1,349,129 square kilometres, the Northern Territorys population of 244,000 makes it the least populous of Australias eight major states and territories, having fewer than half as many people as Tasmania. The archaeological history of the Northern Territory begins over 40,000 years ago when Indigenous Australians settled the region, makassan traders began trading with the indigenous people of the Northern Territory for trepang from at least the 18th century onwards. The coast of the territory was first seen by Europeans in the 17th century, the British were the first Europeans to attempt to settle the coastal regions. After three failed attempts to establish a settlement, success was achieved in 1869 with the establishment of a settlement at Port Darwin. Today the economy is based on tourism, especially Kakadu National Park in the Top End and the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in central Australia, the capital and largest city is Darwin. The population is not concentrated in regions but rather along the Stuart Highway. The other major settlements are Palmerston, Alice Springs, Katherine, Nhulunbuy, residents of the Northern Territory are often known simply as Territorians and fully as Northern Territorians, or more informally as Top Enders and Centralians. With the coming of the British, there were four attempts to settle the harsh environment of the northern coast. The Northern Territory was part of colonial New South Wales from 1825 to 1863, except for a time from February to December 1846. It was part of South Australia from 1863 to 1911, under the administration of colonial South Australia, the overland telegraph was constructed between 1870 and 1872. A railway was built between Palmerston and Pine Creek between 1883 and 1889. The economic pattern of raising and mining was established so that by 1911 there were 513,000 cattle. Victoria River Downs was at one time the largest cattle station in the world, gold was found at Grove Hill in 1872 and at Pine Creek, Brocks Creek, Burrundi, and copper was found at Daly River. On 1 January 1911, a decade after federation, the Northern Territory was separated from South Australia, alfred Deakin opined at this time To me the question has been not so much commercial as national, first, second, third and last. Either we must accomplish the peopling of the territory or submit to its transfer to some other nation. In late 1912 there was growing sentiment that the name Northern Territory was unsatisfactory, the names Kingsland, Centralia and Territoria were proposed with Kingsland becoming the preferred choice in 1913

3.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark

4.
Agglutination
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Agglutination is a process in linguistic morphology derivation in which complex words are formed by stringing together morphemes without changing them in spelling or phonetics. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages, an example of such a language is Turkish, where for example, the word evlerinizden, or from your houses, consists of the morphemes, ev-ler-iniz-den with the meanings house-plural-your-from. However, both fusional and isolating languages may use agglutination in the most-often-used constructs, and use agglutination heavily in certain contexts and this is the case in English, which has an agglutinated plural marker -s and derived words such as shame·less·ness. Agglutinative suffixes are often inserted irrespective of syllabic boundaries, for example, Agglutinative languages also have large inventories of enclitics, which can be and are separated from the word root by native speakers in daily usage. Note that the term agglutination is sometimes used more generally to refer to the process of adding suffixes or other morphemes to the base of a word. This is treated in detail in the section on other uses of the term. However, contemporary linguistics views this proposal as controversial, on the other hand, it is also the case that some languages that have developed from agglutinative proto-languages have lost this feature. For example, contemporary Estonian, which is so related to Finnish that the two languages are mutually intelligible, has shifted towards the fusional type. Examples of agglutinative languages include the Uralic languages, such as Finnish, Estonian and these have highly agglutinated expressions in daily usage, and most words are bisyllabic or longer. Grammatical information expressed by adpositions in Western Indo-European languages is found in suffixes. Hungarian uses extensive agglutination in almost all and any part of it, the suffixes follow each other in special order, and can be heaped in extreme amount, resulting words conveying complex meanings in very compact form. An example is fiaié where the root fi- means son, the subsequent three vowels are all separate suffixes, and the word means of his/her sons. The nested possessive structure and expression of plurals is quite remarkable, almost all Austronesian languages, such as Malay, and most Philippine languages, also belong to this category, thus enabling them to form new words from simple base forms. The Indonesian and Malay word mempertanggungjawabkan is formed by adding active-voice, causative and transitive affixes to the compound verb tanggung jawab, in Tagalog, nakakapágpabagabag is formed from the root bagabag. Japanese is also a language, adding information such as negation, passive voice, past tense, honorific degree. Common examples would be hatarakaseraretara, which combines causative, passive or potential, and if could make work, and tabetakunakatta, which combines desire, negation, and past tense conjugations to mean did not want to eat. All Dravidian languages, including Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil, are agglutinative, agglutination is used to very high degrees both in formal written forms in Telugu. Agglutination is also a feature of Basque

5.
Compound (linguistics)
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In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of formation that creates compound lexemes. That is, in terms, compounding occurs when two or more words are joined to make one longer word. The meaning of the compound may be similar to or different from the meanings of its components in isolation, with very few exceptions, English compound words are stressed on their first component stem. The process occurs readily in other Germanic languages for different reasons, words can be concatenated both to mean the same as the sum of two words or where an adjective and noun are compounded. The addition of affix morphemes to words should not be confused with nominal composition, compound formation rules vary widely across language types. In a synthetic language, the relationship between the elements of a compound may be marked with a case or other morpheme. This latter pattern is common throughout the Semitic languages, though in some it is combined with a genitive case. Agglutinative languages tend to very long words with derivational morphemes. Compounds may or may not require the use of derivational morphemes also, the longest compounds in the world may be found in the Finnic and Germanic languages. German examples include Farbfernsehgerät, Funkfernbedienung, and the jocular word Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze, in Finnish, although there is theoretically no limit to the length of compound words, words consisting of more than three components are rare. Even those with less than three components can look mysterious to non-Finnish such as hätäuloskäytävä, compounds can be rather long when translating technical documents from English to some other language, since the lengths of the words are theoretically unlimited, especially in chemical terminology. For example, the English compound doghouse, where house is the head, endocentric compounds tend to be of the same part of speech as their head, as in the case of doghouse. For example, the English compound white-collar is neither a kind of collar nor a white thing, in an exocentric compound, the word class is determined lexically, disregarding the class of the constituents. For example, a must-have is not a verb but a noun, the meaning of this type of compound can be glossed as whose B is A, where B is the second element of the compound and A the first. A bahuvrihi compound is one whose nature is expressed by neither of the words, copulative compounds are compounds with two semantic heads. Appositional compounds are lexemes that have two attributes that classify the compound, most natural languages have compound nouns. The positioning of the words according to the language

6.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters

7.
Retroflex consonant
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A retroflex consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants, especially in Indology, other terms occasionally encountered are domal and cacuminal. The Latin-derived word retroflex means bent back, some consonants are pronounced with the tongue fully curled back so that articulation involves the underside of the tongue tip. These sounds are described as true retroflex consonants. Retroflex consonants, like other consonants, come in several varieties. The tongue may be flat or concave, or even with the tip curled back. The point of contact on the tongue may be with the tip, with the blade, the point of contact on the roof of the mouth may be with the alveolar ridge, the area behind the alveolar ridge, or the hard palate. Finally, both sibilant and nonsibilant consonants can have a retroflex articulation, the greatest variety of combinations occurs with sibilants, because for these, small changes in tongue shape and position cause significant changes in the resulting sound. Retroflex sounds in general have a duller, lower-pitched sound than other alveolar or postalveolar consonants, and especially the grooved alveolar sibilants. The farther back the point of contact with the roof of the mouth, the concave is the shape of the tongue. The main combinations normally observed are, Laminal post-alveolar, with a flat tongue and these occur, for example, in Polish cz, sz, ż, dż and Mandarin zh, ch, sh, r. Apical post-alveolar, with a somewhat concave tongue and these occur, for example, in Hindi and other Indo-Aryan languages. Subapical palatal, with a highly concave tongue and these occur particularly in the Dravidian languages. These are the dullest and lowest-pitched type, and when following a vowel often add strong r-coloring to the vowel and these are not a place of articulation, as the IPA chart implies, but a shape of the tongue analogous to laminal and apical. Apical alveolar, with a somewhat concave tongue and these occur, for example, in peninsular Spanish and Basque. These sounds dont quite fit on the front-to-back, laminal-to-subapical continuum, with a relatively dull, the subapical sounds are sometimes called true retroflex because of the curled-back shape of the tongue, while the other sounds sometimes go by other names. For example, Ladefoged and Maddieson prefer to call the laminal post-alveolar sounds flat post-alveolar, the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ is an allophone of the alveolar approximant /ɹ/ in many dialects of American English, particularly in the Midwestern United States. Polish and Russian possess retroflex sibilants, but no stops or liquids at this place of articulation, in African languages retroflex consonants are also very rare, reportedly occurring in a few Nilo-Saharan languages

8.
Front vowel
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Front vowels are sometimes also called bright vowels because they are perceived as sounding brighter than the back vowels. Near-front vowels are essentially a type of front vowels, no language is known to contrast front and near-front vowels based on frontness alone, rounded front vowels are typically centralized, that is, near-front in their articulation. This is one reason they are written to the right of unrounded front vowels in the IPA vowel chart, in articulation, front vowels contrast with raised vowels and retracted vowels. In this conception, front vowels are a broader category than those listed in the IPA chart, including, raised or retracted vowels may be fronted by certain consonants, such as palatals and in some languages pharyngeals. For example, /a/ may be fronted to next to /j/ or /ħ/ and this change can be allophonic variation, or it can have become phonemic. English follows the French pattern, but without as much regularity, however, for native or early borrowed words affected by palatalization, English has generally altered the spelling after the pronunciation Back vowel List of phonetics topics

9.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as fï¿½r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character

10.
Alveolar consonant
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Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth. Alveolar consonants may be articulated with the tip of the tongue, as in English, or with the flat of the tongue just above the tip, as in French and Spanish. The laminal alveolar articulation is often called dental, because the tip of the tongue can be seen near to or touching the teeth. The International Phonetic Alphabet does not have symbols for the alveolar consonants. Rather, the symbol is used for all coronal places of articulation that are not palatalized like English palato-alveolar sh. To disambiguate, the bridge may be used for a dental consonant, note that differs from dental in that the former is a sibilant and the latter is not. Differs from postalveolar in being unpalatalized, the bare letters, etc. cannot be assumed to specifically represent alveolars. If it is necessary to specify a consonant as alveolar, a diacritic from the Extended IPA may be used, the letters ⟨s, t, n, l⟩ are frequently called alveolar, and the language examples below are all alveolar sounds. Alveolar consonants are transcribed in the IPA as follows, The alveolar or dental consonants and are, along with, nonetheless, there are a few languages that lack them. A few languages on Bougainville Island and around Puget Sound, such as Makah, lack nasals and therefore, colloquial Samoan, however, lacks both and, but it has a lateral alveolar approximant /l/. In Standard Hawaiian, is an allophone of /k/, but /l/, in labioalveolars, the lower lip contacts the alveolar ridge. Such sounds are typically the result of a severe overbite, the Sounds of the Worlds Languages

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A Sea of Hands outside the AIATSIS building on Acton Peninsula. The Sea of Hands was created in 2014 with the help of local communities, to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the National Apology to Australia's First Peoples, 2008.

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Chrissy Grant, Chair of the AIATSIS Research Ethics Committee, running a GERAIS workshop at AIATSIS, 2015

Part of the UNESCO listed Australian Indigenous Language collection held at AIATSIS

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin …

Image: Cardinal vowels Jones x ray

The authors of textbooks or similar publications often create revised versions of the IPA chart to express their own preferences or needs. The image displays one such version. Only the black symbols are part of the IPA; common additional symbols are in grey.